New Products: AMSR2 Rain and Ocean Products

Getting near real-time data over the oceans just became easier thanks to the addition of 10 new products to NASA’s Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS). The new products include:

• Columnar Cloud Liquid Water (day/night)
• Columnar Water Vapor (day/night)
• Wind Speed (day/night)
• Surface Precipitation Rate (day/night)
• Surface Rain Rate (day/night)

These products generally will be available within three to four hours of a satellite overpass, and are available for viewing through NASA’s Worldview or similar GIBS client systems.

The products are from data collected by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) instrument on the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Global Change Observing Mission for Water (GCOM-W1) satellite, and are produced by NASA’s Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE) AMSR2 Processing Center at NASA’s Global Hydrology Resource Center Distributed Active Archive Center (GHRC DAAC).

While LANCE near real-time products are not intended to take the place of data products with the detailed processing necessary for scientific research, they are an invaluable resource for users needing rapid, continually updated views of ongoing Earth processes.